Various Artists

Latitudes; 2011

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Most countries have some sort of music industry. It may be small or a little ramshackle but it's there, helping to make recordings available in some sort of semi-orderly fashion. It promotes performances, broadcasts music, talks about music in publications. Mauritania's Beydane and Haratine music has no industry to promote it-- the country is one of the few places in the world with no private or even state system in place to capture and disseminate music. The music happens live, played by musicians hired by an audience; it could be a wedding party, an official function, or just a group of friends who want to do a little dancing. The majority of the musicians live and work in Nouakchott, the sprawling, mostly improvised capital city

Mauritania is a vast country, bigger than Texas and New Mexico combined, but in much of that space there are no people. Nearly every one of the country's roughly three million people lives in the Southwest, near the coast and the Senegal River, and a full third of them are in Nouakchott. The Beydane (who we call Moors) and the Haratine are Mauritania's dominant ethnic groups, and their language, a dialect of Arabic called Hassaniya, is the most widely spoken (along with French, which is used mostly in official contexts). To describe Mauritanian Beydane and Haratine music is superficially simple: It consists primarily of singers, improvising based on poetry, hand percussion, and guitar or a similar local stringed instrument-- guitar has since 1976 largely supplanted the tidinitt lute (played by men) and the ardin harp (played by women).

The guitar is electric, I should add. This, in a city where electricity service is not comprehensive, to say the least. There have been a few attempts to record Beydane guitar music over the years in a controlled, high-fidelity environment, and one could get the impression from listening to these that the music is pretty sedate, but this is misleading. As one listen to Wallahi Le Zein quickly shows, this is music of immense energy. Trying to record it in a studio robs it of the primary engine that drives it, which is audience response. The musicians crank it up when the audience steps it up, and cool it down when the audience gets tired. Matthew Lavoie, the set's compiler, at first attempted to make some of his own recordings in specially arranged sessions with an audience, but to hear him tell it in his extensive liner notes, the lack of a proper music-making occasion resulting in sterile recordings that got the technical bits right but missed on the spirit of the music.

But Lavoie was truly in love with this music, and wouldn't be deterred. Over the course of years and many visits to Mauritania, he collected privately recorded cassettes of performances until he had a massive archive to draw from. It's not unusual for the people paying the musicians to record a performance for a souvenir-- as you can imagine, though, the quality of those recordings is often abysmal, so sorting for a set of tracks that both captured the spirit of the music as it's normally performed and satisfied even some very rudimentary standards of fidelity took some work. The compiler's passion for the music and knowledge of its history, performance and underlying theory is on full display in the thick booklet that comes with this set-- expanding it into a book wouldn't be out of the question.

Without getting too far into the specifics of it, all of the music on this set is built around a very basic modal structure. There are a set number of modes in the music, which must be played in a certain order, and each mode has two different rhythmic characters (one legato, one staccato), to be played in a specific order. But beyond that, it's wide open. Tempo, the actual melody played within the mode, the play of voice against guitar, the rhythm, and a host of other factors come into play in every piece. You have to really study the music to hear the ingredients as distinct from one another.

The recordings are raw, essentially field recordings. People can be heard talking to the musicians, whistling; I swear there's one track where I can hear a chicken at one point. Some are instrumental, some are vocal, and most have muffled hand drums driving the rhythm. The singing is melismatic and full-bore-- it's recognizable if you know much Arabic of West African music. But the meat of this music for a listener who speaks no Hassaniya is the guitar. There is some breathtaking guitar playing in this music, a manic, psychedelic edge and free-floating intensity that makes me think of Hendrix playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," but like that all the time. Distortion from blown speaker cones is a common sonic element, but you hear the occasional pedal or strange flanged tone as well.

The music doesn't flow in the sense that Westerners typically expect dance music to flow. It will stop abruptly, turn in unexpected directions, stutter in the middle of a phrase-- this is how the music works, musicians responding to what their audience is doing or saying, how much money it's throwing their way. All of it is decided on the spot-- these musicians don't rehearse written pieces of music, and they frequently perform with musicians they haven't played with before. On a first listen, when you haven't acclimated yourself to what these men and women are doing with the music, it is disorienting. But once you learn to flow with it, it's a rush a minute, and the skill of the players really is something to behold. Baba ould Hembara does this thing on his tracks where he's hammering the strings with his left hand, finely articulating full melodies with a hammer-on-- it sounds like the chatter of birds as much as a guitar. To isolate one example, the distorted, sandstorm psych onslaught of Mohamed Guitar's "banjey" (banjey is a form, not a title), is pretty easy for anyone to understand.

Wallahi Le Zein is somewhat similar to a Sublime Frequencies radio or field recording release, except that this has a much deeper interest in the musicological, historical, and cultural underpinnings of what's going on here. Lavoie isn't just putting this stuff out there for you-- the liner notes are an educational document reflecting years of research and real, focused passion for the subject matter, rather than a basic interest in otherness. This is in some ways this compilation's greatest gift-- this is the first curated collection of unfiltered Mauritanian guitar music ever, and I'm glad it's been introduced with such thoroughness and care.